Emacs mode

Emacs has a ‘lilypond-mode’, which provides keyword
autocompletion, indentation, LilyPond specific parenthesis matching
and syntax coloring, handy compile short-cuts and reading LilyPond
manuals using Info. If ‘lilypond-mode’ is not installed on your
platform, see below.

An Emacs mode for entering music and running LilyPond is contained in
the source archive in the ‘elisp’ directory. Do make
install to install it to elispdir. The file ‘lilypond-init.el’
should be placed to load-path‘/site-start.d/’ or appended
to your ‘~/.emacs’ or ‘~/.emacs.el’.

As a user, you may want add your source path (e.g. ‘~/site-lisp/’) to
your load-path by appending the following line (as modified) to your
‘~/.emacs’

Vim mode

For Vim, a filetype plugin, indent
mode, and syntax-highlighting mode are available to use with
LilyPond. To enable all of these features, create (or modify)
your ‘$HOME/.vimrc’ to contain these three lines, in order:

filetype off
set runtimepath+=/usr/local/share/lilypond/current/vim/
filetype on
syntax on

If LilyPond is not installed in the ‘/usr/local/’ directory,
change the path appropriately. This topic is discussed in
Other sources of information.

Other editors

Other editors (both text and graphical) support LilyPond, but
their special configuration files are not distributed with
LilyPond. Consult their documentation for more information. Such
editors are listed in Easier editing.